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| 1981 Moldvay Basic |
I've been playing roleplaying games for about 20 years, and a lot of that time has been spent behind the screen, running games for other people. For several years now I've been consuming massive amounts of OSR content, and working on an expansive, potentially endless campaign. I've ran multiple playtests with friends both in person and online, and revised and changed the game based on their feedback. Although the exact system and house rules have changed over time, I always end up coming back to B/X with a smidgen of houserules.
Earlier this summer I decided it was finally time to get a semi-regular game going. I recruited my friends, some of which are huge fans of OSR and Basic D&D, and some of which have never played an edition older than 5th before. We have been meeting every 2-4 weeks to play, and the plan is to continue this campaign indefinitely. I'll be using this blog to talk about my experiences at these sessions, as well as going over my thought process at the table.
I've always wanted to start a blog where I post the OSR content I've created, but I dislike the idea of posting things like rules, encounters, and systems without having first tested them at the table. There are a lot of really great OSR bloggers out there, but there is also a fair amount of armchair dungeon mastering going on. That is to say, authors who have never and will never playtest the content they publicly release. There can still be some value to this content if it leads to getting the brain juices flowing, but more often than not I've found that a lot of this content, even some of the more popular stuff within the community, doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when playtested.
I don't say this as an attack on any particular OSR content creator, but rather to stress my primary goal going forward with this blog: all gameable content released on this blog will have already seen at least minimal playtesting in actual games prior to being posted here. In just a few months worth of sessions, I have already made a massive amount of changes to all the work I've done based on feedback and playtesting with my group. At this point, pretty much everything I've produced whole cloth has become a living document under constant revision.
Whether my content ends up getting cribbed for your own game or simply inspires you to make something entirely different from scratch, I hope this blog will prove to be a useful tool for those in the D&D and OSR communities.
- AJ Forrest (pseudonym)
